I remember when Reddit announced it would begin charging commercial developers for access to its API, and in response, thousands of subreddits went dark in protest. I think it lasted for a couple of weeks. The CEO threatened the Reddit mods that he would replace them if they didn’t reopen the subs, so nearly every mod reopened and everything went back to normal. The CEO won easily without offering anything, and he was right when he said that ‘this too shall pass.’ Those third-party apps offered accessibility features for disabled people that Reddit still hasn’t implemented today. Now Reddit is getting even worse. How come there wasn’t a protest like that when they made even worse decisions?
It needs to be understood that the culture before this happened was very different than it is now.
The mods basically owned their subreddits. Mods could do anything they wanted. You could ban someone for the color of their socks. You had full control of the CSS coding and functionality of your subreddit, so you could make it look like dogshit for the laughs and ban anyone who typed the letter L. Some subreddits got popular just for being weird like this. Whatever you wanted to do, it didn’t matter. If you didn’t like how a subreddit was ran you just made your own. If you made a subreddit then that was the corner of your internet to do whatever you wanted with. That was the tradeoff. You got a space in return for creating it. You didn’t even need to moderate it.
After the mods got removed from their subreddits for protesting it became very clear that the subreddits were not theirs anymore. It was the first time reddit ever took actions against moderators for something that wasn’t blatantly illegal.
Yep, when they started forcing subreddits to open after having gone dark, that was the final straw for me. It was clear reddit was saying “fuck you, we own the platform and you can’t do shit about it.”